Bail Organa was finally freed from the senate meeting, worn thin from the endless debate over funds, he was eager when he met Padme in the corridor of the senate building.
She was back in her professional clothing, a long elegant dress of drab colors but ornate design, her hair pulled back and styled elaborately around her head. She greeted him as she always did in those corridors, they exchanged a friendly greeting, and inconspicuously handed over the data disk, that he was easily able to conceal in his own robes. She had to wonder if Bail knew what connection there was between her and the former Jedi, beyond their official acquaintance and obvious friendship throughout the years.
As soon as she was brought up to date on the senate meeting, they found a way to plan their next secret alliance meeting. They were going to meet in the lobby of Padme's apartment, as they often did, tomorrow morning, to discuss the information from Organa's contact.
For now, Padme had a few hours to herself. Obi-Wan said he would come to her in four hours, and that was two hours ago. She went straight home, struggling to not appear to be in any particular hurry. One could never tell if eyes were watching.
Again, they had to operate in secret.
She was used to secrets, but there was no longer the guilt of breaking any sacred codes. That was enough to make her heart soar as she arrived home.
When she entered her apartment, she was greeted as always by C-3PO.
"Welcome back, my lady," he said chipperly. "Is there anything I can do for you?"
"Have any visitors come?"
"Not today. Will we be expecting any?"
"Yes… A friend will be visiting in the next hour or so…" she blushed. "A… gentleman friend."
Protocol droids knew how to pick up cues for discretion and Threepio tilted towards her, lowering the volume of his voice. "Understood, my lady…"
"Then in the morning we will be entertaining a few representatives of the senate again."
"Wonderful!" The protocol droid always was a fan of hosting guests. "Would you like me to prepare refreshments tonight for you and your caller?"
"Later perhaps, thank you, Threepio. You may go…"
The gold droid shuffled away obediently and now she had nothing to do but wait. She waited… and waited. An hour passed. Then another half hour. With every minute she began to fear the worst. She paced anxiously, she had told her handmaidens that she wouldn't need them for the night, so no one was coming. At least, no one was supposed to come except for him.
What if he was caught? What if he was forced to flee the planet? She checked the HoloNet, almost obsessively. She paced, checked it again. Not a word.
She sat in the open veranda on one of the soft, curved couches, her hands tightly clinging to one another when she heard the whine of a speeder landing at her balcony. She practically flew from her seat, speeding past C-3PO and out onto the balcony. Obi-Wan was climbing from his parked speeder. He was no longer wearing the Dressellian disguise. The jacket that he was wearing looked rather more rugged than was befitting his character, contrasting the perfect trim of his hair and beard that he seemed to maintain. It may have lacked the imposed importance of a Jedi dress code, but he did not look any worse in it. In fact, without the multitude of Jedi layers, she could see the trim physique of his body more easily. He was wearing a helmet and the same goggles as before, which concealed his identity from anyone who might have been watching the open space of her veranda.
He grinned as he stepped towards her, no longer hiding behind some demure smirk. This was a Jedi allowing himself to be happy and she smiled back at him so widely her cheeks hurt. She didn't know what to say, she just laughed and threw her arms around him. For a moment, they said nothing and they didn't move. Her heart was full. Finally she pulled away, curling her fingers into his jacket.
"Will you stay the night with me?" she asked, struggling not to beg for the one thing she wished she could have had all these years.
"You mean until the morning?" he sounded surprised.
"Yes."
"I'd stay for an eternity if I could…" his thumb brushed her cheek. "But I will take it one morning at a time, if I must."
"Please don't be cryptic, my heart can't take it…" she wanted to laugh, but her pulse was too loud in her ears.
He smiled. "The answer is yes…"
She took him by the hand and led him—no, pulled him inside and to her bedroom. He was already removing the helmet and goggles, letting them thud heavily on the floor somewhere. It was dark, like it always was when they had been together. She didn't want it to be the same, she wanted to relish in their new freedom together, this new chapter. She turned on the lights in her room, a warm gold light. It seemed counterintuitive to turn the lights on for romance, so she explained without waiting for him to ask.
"I'm tired of hiding…" she reached over his shoulders, threading her fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck. "I want to see you…"
Now she could see every detail, the lines of age that weren't there before and the grey threads in the hair at his temples that added to that dignified air he had since the day they met. The color of his hair was beginning to catch up to his soul, and she could see a white whisker here and there in his beard that were invisible from a distance.
His hands were on her waist, causing everything inside of her to flutter. She was taking her time, taking every second, savoring it and dragging it out. She pretended he was all hers, she no longer had to share him with the Jedi. Just the same, she belonged to him.
His eyes were trailing over every inch of her face, studying her, lingering on her mouth. Finally, he inched slowly closer, just a light tickle of lips before pressing into a full kiss. She pulled his jacket from his shoulders, slipping it off his arms and tossing it aside. He took it upon himself to remove his belt and the heavy blaster attached to it.
He then reached behind her head and loosened the band in her hair, and the multiple pins to free the thick tresses. Her hair cascaded down and she hummed at the sensation of his fingers running through. In the past, she had always taken down her own hair, undressed herself. This small act from him, a former Jedi letting loose her hair, felt naughtier than it should have. She wanted him to take everything off of her, she wanted him to indulge himself.
She found the tail of his shirt and pulled it up over his head, mussing the auburn strands enough for them to fall over his eyes. What she saw on his skin beneath made her breath catch for a different reason. Parts of him were yellowed with bruising, the skin torn, but healing at his elbow from what must have been a nasty gash.
"Oh, Obi-Wan…" she lightly touched her fingers on the bruising. "How…?"
He looked down, following her gaze. "My ship had a rough landing, that's all…" he said it so lightly, as if he had tripped on his own feet. "It doesn't hurt…" He smiled reassuringly.
It was his turn now to take a layer, and she was wearing quite a few. The embroidered corset was tightly fastened at her back, so she obligingly turned around to grant him access. She was itching under her skin, aching for him, but forcing patience. She was determined not to give in to the starving urgency of their previous nights together.
He had been fiddling with those clasps for some time.
"Blast this!" he grumbled under his breath.
She giggled at his struggle, a hand over her mouth.
"I refuse to believe this is one of the biggest challenges you've ever faced…" she said coyly over her shoulder.
"Single-handedly fighting a hundred battle droids is infinitely simpler than this…" he huffed and gave up.
She was about to help when something released all of the fastenings at once, as if a great key had been turned, and the corset opened and fell to her feet. She blinked at it and turned to him again.
"Did you just…?"
He was smirking. "The Force has many uses…"
The dress she had on beneath hung loosely from her shoulders, and now he had much more ease slipping off the bangles from her arms, the choker from around her throat. Every layer being removed by his hands made her shiver with rising heat. He got her down to her dress slip before he finally let her have her turn. He pulled off his own boots and she worked at the front of his pants.
Her hands were fumbling now with anticipation, and she was failing at her task. The tables were now turned. She couldn't take it. She gave up and just grabbed him by the waistband, leading him to the bed and pulling his full weight on top of her. His lips were instantly on hers, kissing her madly, her skirt hiking up over her thighs.
A whimper escaped her and she clawed desperately at his back. The deep hum that rose out of him at her touch was wonderful. His hands explored her, sliding along her thighs, up along her hips, her waist, bunching her dress ever upward along the way.
Never had she seen him lose control like this, even in their past interactions, there was always some degree of command, some small tether grounded in consciousness and the outside world. But he was lost in her, moaning her name and clumsily kissing her lips, her neck... More than once she was overcome with rapture and she let him know when she cried out his name in return, biting once or twice at his shoulder.
When it ended, for that moment they were of one body, feeling the same paralyzing thrill down to their fingertips, the world swirling, lungs and hearts laboring for air.
When the noise cleared, they died together just for a moment in each other's arms. His full weight was on her, exhausted as he tried to catch his breath with his face buried into the crook of her neck. She just held him, ignoring that old habit of needing to be out of bed and dressed in an instant.
It was the middle of the night.
They had nowhere to be but here.
His breathing leveled out and he moved to roll off of her self-consciously, but she held him where he was. She welcomed the weight. And he was kissing her again, lazily placing pecks all along her cheeks, under her eyes, her jaw, and she could not stop smiling in the shower of affection that he could never give her before. She was disappointed when he stopped, to look her in the eye.
"I love you…" he breathed.
Was she dreaming again?
"Say it again…"
He chuckled with that beautiful, now delirious grin. "I love you, Padme… I love you…" he said it over and over, punctuated with more kisses. "I love you…"
She finally let him lie on the bed beside her, arms still around each other, noses almost touching. Separation at this point felt impossible. He was looking at her in quiet adoration, as if admiring her from afar, his fingers lightly toying with the curls of her hair.
"Obi-Wan…" she said softly. "Are you alright?"
He blinked quizzically. "I would say I am more than alright…" A devious smirk tugged beneath the beard.
She blushed, pinching her eyes closed with a giggle. "No… That's not what I mean…" She looked into the blue of his eyes again. "With everything that's happened to you… It must have killed you to leave the Jedi Order… And then what happened on Renoss…"
His eyes dimmed a little. She didn't want to ruin the moment of contentment, but she was unable to shake the sense of fatigue in him. Her hand rested on his cheek as he said nothing for a moment.
"I wanted to come to you when I left the Order…" he finally said. "I knew I could come to you, at last… But I'm… I was too ashamed." He was pretending the shame was past tense. "The last thing you needed was a disgraced Jedi crawling to your door…"
"I was worried about you. Every day. I would have been happy with just a message to know you were alright…"
He turned his head, placing an apologetic kiss into her palm, his gaze downcast. "I'm sorry, Padme… After what had happened with Anakin, it seemed the fewer Jedi you had in your life, the better… At least for awhile…"
There was an involuntary shudder to think of Anakin, and with it came a light ache in her heart. "How is Anakin?"
His eyes lifted to her, a hint of surprise, but immense sadness. "I wish I knew…" He sighed, pausing heavily. "Padme… There is something you should know…"
That was never a comforting segue. She held her breath and waited for him to continue.
"The battalion that carried out the orders, and wound up arresting me… was the Five-oh-First..."
"Anakin was there?"
He nodded.
She was sitting up now, leaning on an elbow. "Did you speak to him? Couldn't you have convinced him not to carry out the attack?"
"I tried…" he said tiredly, sitting up as well and leaning against the headboard of the bed. He reached down for the blanket, pulling it to cover them both now that their blood was cooled and the room's chill was settling in. He made sure to pull the blanket up to her shoulders before covering himself. "He contacted me through hologram first… He insisted that they had their orders, that my reconnaissance was flawed. I have never known him to be so strict in following orders… unless if it complied with his own ideals…"
There was so much left unsaid, all of it carefully concealed between the lines. He was hurting, she could tell, even if he tried to control it or hide it. He raised Anakin, had always tried to do what was best for him. She didn't wish ill on Anakin any more than Obi-Wan could, but she could not help the sting to know that Anakin could lead such a massacre, blindly following orders and arresting his old mentor and friend. The worst part of it was how it disturbed Obi-Wan. He did not seem to know the level of violence that Anakin was capable of. She did. And she still could not get herself to betray Anakin's secret, because she refused to let that side of him define him.
"I'm sorry…" she whispered. "Maybe someday he'll be able to help… If we could just talk to him…"
"He is too close to Chancellor Palpatine, and I am now an enemy of the Republic…"
"I still can't believe how easily they turned on you…"
He sighed and shrugged one shoulder, as if resigned to fate. "When I stepped down from the Order, I was just a General. A soldier. And soldiers, from the point of view of the Galactic Republic, are expected to follow orders. Only a Jedi is permitted or expected to act on the inherent laws of what is good. And I truly believe that Anakin was doing what he believed was right."
By his tone, she knew Obi-Wan did not find comfort in that.
He sighed and smiled. "But we are dwelling on things that we cannot control… I would much rather be here…" he took her hand, kissing her palm again. "… here and now…"
The chaste kiss to her hand sent a tingle through her whole body and she couldn't help smiling again. "If you're going to get me to stop talking politics, you'll have to use a better distraction than that…" she teased.
The challenge was accepted in a smirk, and he gently but firmly pulled her to him, mouths meeting in a deep, sensuous kiss. It wasn't long before hands wandered and blood was racing through their veins again. They still had the rest of the night ahead of them…
AUTHOR'S NOTE: HEYO. What? A steamy chapter? It's been so long. So, as always, the naughty chapters are edited down for this website. (So if it seems like there are bits missing… Yeah, I deleted at least 1,000 words.) If you would like to read the unrated version, you can find it over on AO3.
